Magnetism – Session 6

Session 6 on January 14th 2012

The learning goals planned for the session were –
1. To introduce like and unlike poles using the jumping frog activity
I found the jumping frog activity in Arvind Gupta’s website very interesting and useful to introduce like and unlike poles.
You can find a video of the activity at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JvB9Mp1lwQ .
The link explains the activity, so I am no repeating here.
The class was divided in to teams of 4 and asked to perform this activity with some straws, ring magnets.
The only instruction I gave was that the magents should not touch each other and left the rest for them to figure out.

In earlier classes, the children experienced attraction and repulsion between magnets by reversing the side of the magnet that faces the other. I was expecting them to use that in this class and they did 🙂

They brought one side of the magnet closer to the other magnet to see if it repels and then slowly added one by one. Once they got this, we got the teams to draw something of their choice and add try to put it on top of the first magnet. But, we could not complete this well as we did not seem to have a strong support for the base – straw and also something to stick the picture they drew. So, we kept the final thing to the next session and moved on.

Now, I asked the students what they did so that the magnets did not touch each other and most of them yelled out saying they had reversed the side of the magnet. Then I asked them about poles which they learnt in earlier classes, asked them point out where the poles were for a ring magnet. They were now able to understand that when they reversed the sides, the poles changed.

I took this to introduced like and unlike poles. Told them that like poles were poles of the same type that will repel and unlike poles were of different type and will attract. I could not take it further as we ran out of time.

I could sense that the students did not understand much but just picked the words like and unlike. So, I decided to spend the next session on explaining this.

Extras tried during the activity –
1. Placed all 3 ring magnets on the table and asked a team to move 2 magnets using the other one without touching each other. This was to again bring the
concept of repulsion.
2. While one team tried this, the other one put 2 magnets on the table, one under the table and tried moving the top 2.